Brennan's plight rooted in '96 as much as 9/11

By Jim Dee
letters@irishecho.com

June 25, 2008 Sitting 20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, tiny Turcotte, Texas has seen its share of hurricanes. However, an unlucky Irishman passing through the area five months ago encountered a different maelstrom: new U.S. immigration and Homeland Security realities that have him jailed at time when his native Northern Ireland is at peace, and Washington hails some of his former IRA comrades as statesman.

Maze escapee Pol Brennan has been cooling his heels in a Texas immigration jail since being detained at a U.S. immigration checkpoint north of Turcotte on January 27 - this for having a lapsed U.S. work permit.

The fact that Brennan had filed the renewal form on time, and that U.S. authorities simply hadn't updated it at the time he was stopped, was deemed irrelevant.

So too was Britain's 2000 decision to drop its efforts to extradite Brennan back to Northern Ireland for being one of 38 IRA men who escaped the Maze prison in September 1983.

And Homeland Security prosecutors haven't been moved by the fact that federal officials had earlier authorized Brennan to live freely in the San Francisco Bay area for years while awaiting the outcome of his political asylum application.

America is far different place today than when Brennan was first arrested in 1993. The U.S. has been waging a "war on terror" since 9/11, and a bourgeoning security apparatus headed by the Department of Homeland Security looks more harshly than before at anyone with even the remotest connection to terrorism.

But "war on terror" realities aren't the chief reason that Brennan now faces the toughest battle of his 15 year struggle remain in the United States and with his American citizen wife.

Far more pertinent is the fact that his current deportation case is being framed by tough 1996 immigration reforms that scorn most circumstantial considerations and discourage any nuanced interpretations of individual cases by judges.

Like the 'three-strikes-and-your-out' criminal laws so popular nationwide in the 1990s, the 1996 immigration reforms mandate black-and-white remedies to deal with undocumented immigrants whose circumstances are can often complicated and mitigating factors.

On the surface, the case against Brennan seems pretty open-and-shut. He has a 1995 felony gun conviction that appears to disqualify him from staying in the U.S. under any circumstance under the rules contained in the 1996 legislation.

He bought the gun from a licensed dealer in the early 1990s. However, by using an alias when buying it, he committed a felony.

Given the clichéd depictions of "hardened terrorists" prevalent in pop culture today, it might be presumed that the IRA fugitive was "packing" in preparation of shooting his way out if the feds ever swooped. But Brennan's reality was much more mundane.

For starters, when the FBI arrested him in January 1993, he didn't even own the gun anymore. He'd sold it to finance his new hobby: astronomy, which he'd taken up after his wife bought him a telescopic viewer in the hopes of weaning him off the target-shooting hobby that she feared would cause problems.

"I obtained a pistol for the purpose of target shooting in the early '90s," Brennan told the Irish Echo, during a phone interview from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas.

"After the initial fascination wore off, I resold the pistol and bought my first telescope, as my interest in astronomy grew and the opportunity to buy some real observational equipment meant that I could put my spare time to better use increasing my knowledge of the night sky, instead of just punching holes in paper targets," said Brennan.

But what possessed him to risk buying a gun in the first place?

Brennan told the Echo that, having grown up in Belfast's Ballymurphy area - an IRA stronghold that saw daily gun battles in the early 1970s - he'd grown up viewing guns differently than someone reared in a place like Westchester County, New York or Palm Springs, California.

"It's not unusual for people who grow up around guns to retain an interest in them after their initial exposure," said Brennan.

"Coming from an unstable situation in my own country where I was exposed to an underground gun culture that arose in defense of neighborhoods that I grew up in, and being mechanically-minded, I was drawn to the unique mechanical systems of guns."

Brennan knows that he made a major mistake in buying the pistol. But he stressed that he believed that he'd already paid his debt to society for the offense.

"When I was fighting my extradition case back in the mid-90s, this gun charge was dealt with by (U.S. District Court) Judge Charles Legge, who found that I had only obtained the said pistol for sporting purposes," said Brennan. "He gave me six months, time-served, for the offense. That's where I thought it ended. Apparently not."

The gun issue might have faded away had it not been for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.

Passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the IIRIRA dramatically increased spending on border enforcement. Outlays for detention and deportation of illegal immigrants have risen in the intervening years by 750 percent.

A central plank of the IIRIRA was its virtually elimination of any hope of judicial relief from deportation for any undocumented immigrant who commits a crime in the U.S.

"Since the 1996 immigration reforms, the big crackdown has been on criminal aliens," said Kevin Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in how the "war on terror" has impacted civil liberties and racial profiling.

Johnson said that post-9/11 deportations have risen dramatically.

"Every year we're setting records for the number of people deported. The last couple of years it's been around 200,000 a year," he said.

Professor Johnson said that America has a long history of enacting legislation to deal with a perceived threat from immigrants, from the Chinese Exclusion Laws of 1882, to Cold War provisions that allowed for the deportation of communists and political dissidents.

"And, in some ways, the fear of terrorism, the fear of criminal aliens, fits in nicely with the long history of our response, some would say over-response, to the perceived immigration threat of the day," he said.

Johnson said that the current focus of immigration enforcement policies is "immigrants who are in the country who have committed crimes. And the laws have become harsher and harsher, tougher and tougher."

"If you've got one conviction, maybe you can avoid deportation. If you've got two convictions, it's harder," he added. "And if you've got a firearms conviction, it's going to be very, very tough to stay."

Northern Ireland now has an historic DUP-Sinn Fein power sharing government. As one of its leaders, former IRA man Martin McGuinness has been warmly welcomed in the White House. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly, who escaped the Maze alongside Brennan, has also traveled freely to and from the U.S. several times in recent years.

Both men have said that tumultuous events on the ground in Northern Ireland three decades ago heavily influenced their decisions to join the republican movement. And clearly their life choices in leaving armed struggle behind in favor of politics have impressed U.S. officials at the highest levels.

Supporters of Pól Brennan - and one politician now arguing in favor of bail is Congressman Peter King, no soft touch when it comes to border security - contend that key events in his life, including his 1977 conviction for ferrying explosives through Belfast, his participation in the grueling blanket, no-wash and hunger strike protests inside the Maze, and his subsequent escape, were also shaped by the troubles.

However, Brennan's war ended when he escaped the Maze prison nearly a quarter of a century ago.

At 56, he has spent nearly half his time on earth, and the overwhelming majority of his adult life, living in America. He has been married to an American woman, Joanna Volz, for 19 years.

Brennan recently put himself through community college and later passed a test to become a certified California building inspector. He has also taken his passion for astronomy to a higher level by becoming a volunteer at Oakland's Chabot observatory, the staff of which sent a glowing character reference letter to judge in his current deportation case.

"I was living quite normally, and moving forward, before all this happened in January," Brennan told the Echo.

"I feel that, in the circumstances that I'm in now, the gun issue is being used in a more punitive way than in other ways it would have been," he added. "I feel that people have moved on over in Ireland. But, in this respect, I've not been allowed to. It's like being in a time warp."

This story appeared in the issue of June 25-July 2, 2008